46
PARTISAN REVIEW
which begin and end the play, the cholera epidemic, the premature eo–
lightenment of the little boy who watches a prostitute in her room
across the areaway-all these episodes, all realistically presented, are the
high spots of the play.
Yet these scenes, however, affecting, seem like excerpts from a con–
ventional play. They are, in fact, like excerpts from
Dead End,
which,
with more sensationalism and less social and economic awareness, was
saying the same thing. What is there in
((one-third of a nation/'
then, to
justify its not being written and staged in the traditional manner? Why
that movie screen, that amplified Voice of the Living Newspaper, that
ubiquitous, intrusive figure of the Consumer, the Little Man Who Wants
to Be Housed? The answer is plain. Each Living Newspaper is intended
to be a large, socio-economic document which has the power of summary
and generalization to go behind case histories to origins, and beyond
case histories to cures. The originality of
Power
came from its fusion
of the abstract and the particular. A high school lesson in economics,
which dramatized the monopoly in terms of colored blocks of wood, was
shortly succeeded by a "human spectacle," in which a crowd of indivi–
dualized Tennesseans danced to the coming of the TVA. In
«one-third
of a nation"
there is still an attempt at historical survey and economic
analysis, but the human "realistic," element has eaten into the
te~tbook
side of the play with confusing and disastrous results.
Everything that in
Power
was abstract has here become personalized.
An anthropomorphizing mania has pervaded the script. In the study
of the development of land values, instead of the blocks of wood which
so well demonstrated their efficiency in the earlier play, the lesson is
acted out by people with well marked ch" ''''':teristics, in fulI period
dress. The Consumer appears again, but n0w .le is outfitted with a
great many more homely crotchets of behavior, and, as if he were not
human enough by himself, he has been endowed with a wife. Even the
tenement house has a personality and a voice. Where the play should be
at its most business-like, most informative, it is actually at its most
whimsicaL The characters assigned to forces and tendencies blur, by
their concrete and untimely humanity, the perception of the forces
themselves. Representationalism and pedestrian fantasy, replacing the
clean, geometric didacticism of
Power,
have muddied and elongated
the play's exposition. The result is that the peripheral story-teIling
sections of the play, to which verisimilitude of characterization is ap–
propriate, quite overshadow the central expository sections, to which it
is not. We remember the example and forget the theorem.
It is possible that the shyness with which
((one-third of a nation"
expresses its theorem is deliberate. It is possible that the walking por–
traits, the speaking likenesses, that crowd the stage are there to create
a diversion. For the play's theorem is certainly faulty. The housing prob–
lem is far knottier than the power problem. It is, in fact, impossible
of solution under capitalism, even the liberal capitalism of the New
DeaL The government can expropriate the power plants without up–
setting the system; and, as was pointed out in
Power,
many municipalities
